


Old Friends

by DeanWinchesterIsTrans



Series: When the Twelfth Doctor Meets Torchwood [3]
Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 22:28:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11389704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeanWinchesterIsTrans/pseuds/DeanWinchesterIsTrans
Summary: Twelfth Doctor and Jack meet (again).This time during the Guarding the Vault Era. Aka Bill Era I love her.





	Old Friends

Jack was hunched over his desk, filling out paperwork. Damned Torchwood files, always needing to be meticulously filled out. Half the time after solving a case, he had to go back and write in required blanks his team had missed.

Each team member was required to write their own report of each event, so as to have a full description of the case from every angle.

Gwen's were usually brief, missing out on dates and times, always in a rush to get back to Rhys. Hers always had a focus on those hurt by Rift activity though, no matter how much of a hurry she was in.

Owen's reports occasionally included an autopsy report, sometimes filled out during the autopsy, which Jack dreaded. Alien bodily fluids were only fun on some occasions. Sometimes, when Owen was particularly bored by a report, he would just write 'blah blah blah' in the blanks, forcing Jack to scribble it out, and write in the correct information.

Tosh's reports were very well filled out on the technical side of things, but sometimes her brain would work faster than her hands, and her sentences would trail off, uncompleted, or they would completely switch subjects halfway through. Due to that, her reports were a bit difficult to read, but, once deciphered, they almost always had all of the required information.

Ianto's reports were meticulously written out in neat handwriting, focusing on the strangest details sometimes. Occasionally his were left half-blank, but that was usually due to Jack distracting him halfway through, so he wasn't really to blame there.

Everyone had gone home for the night, or, wait no, morning. It was morning. As sleep was unnecessary for Jack, the passage of time became more of a wild fever dream than anything fully concrete. He looked at his wrist strap. Couldn't travel in space and time anymore, but it could still tell time. Not entirely useless, plus it was comforting to wear.

5:00am.

Hm. His teammates should start to trickle in in a few hours. There wasn't really a strict report time, fighting hostile aliens wasn't exactly a nine to five, but they all arrived at some point in the morning, nearing afternoon if someone was really hungover.

He heard footsteps approaching his office. He hadn't heard the door, and it was a bit early for anyone on his team, even Ianto, who liked to get there before everyone else, excepting Jack.

Jack looked up, expecting to see a bleary-eyed member of his semi-adoptive family. Upon not seeing one of his teammates, he laughed, out of shock, mostly, "Doctor?"

"In the flesh," the Doctor responded, trying for dramatics, then giving it up for a more reasonable greeting, "Hello, Jack."

"What are you doing here?" Jack asked uncertainly. The Doctor doesn't just visit. Well... he supposed there were those two other times the man visited, and the universe as we know it wasn't in danger of being torn apart. Maybe he's finally learning how to visit a friend.

"Well, that's a bit rude of a way to say 'hello,'" the Doctor said, pretending like he wasn't losing confidence by the second.

"Sorry. Hello. Now what are you doing here?" Jack repeated, softer this time.

"I am... checking up on you. I mentioned you to Bill, and she said I should. So here I am," the Doctor said, fidgeting nervously, unsure if he should just leave, unsure if he wasn't welcome here.

"Oh!" Jack responded, relieved to hear it was an actual visit to say hello to a friend, no imminent death on the horizon. He stood up and hugged the Doctor. He had gotten less... touchy having lived through the nineteenth century, but he was slowly getting more comfortable again in the twenty-first. "It's good to see you," Jack murmured. The Doctor just smiled faintly in response, even though Jack couldn't see it.

Jack pulled away. "So, do you want coffee or something?" he asked, trying to remember if the Doctor liked coffee or not.

He shook his head. "Ah, no thanks."

Jack laughed. "Good, I make awful coffee, and Ianto is the only one who knows what he's doing with that machine anyways."

He walked down the stairs to the main floor, and sat down on the couch underneath the Torchwood sign on the wall. Jack patted the spot next to him. "Come on, sit down and tell me what you've been up to since I last saw you. Also, who's Bill?"

The Doctor sat down, and decided to answer the somewhat simpler part of that request first, "Bill is my student."

"You have students now?" Jack asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes, I teach at a university," he explained

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you don't seem like the kind of man to stay on Earth long enough for that," Jack said, having known two of his face's tendencies to bounce around from place to place, as fast as possible. The thought of him voluntarily staying still seemed impossible.

Thinking of his third regeneration the Doctor said, "Oh, you'd be surprised. I once worked for UNIT."

"I know, I read the files, but you didn't have your TARDIS then, right? I'm fairly certain you do still have her, so why do you stay?" Jack asked, curious.

"I made a promise," the Doctor replied, as if that contained all the answers.

"What sort of promise?" Jack asked, concerned that his friend might've been trapped by some unfair oath.

"I'm to guard a Vault for one thousand years," the Doctor said solemnly.

Jack raised his eyebrows. A mysterious Vault, how about that? "A Vault containing what?" he asked.

"Not what, who," the Doctor said, almost sounding ashamed, "And you're really not going to like the answer."

"Tell me anyways," Jack requested.

The Doctor began to explain. "So you know how we thought the Master was dead?" He figured that was a decent starting point.

"Several times, yes, actually," Jack responded harshly.

"Well she wasn't."

"She?"

"At some point she regenerated as a woman," the Doctor explained. "You know the thing with the dead becoming Cybermen?"

Jack pointed down towards where they kept all the medical supplies, and stored all the bodies. "We have a morgue just down there. How the hell could I forget that?"

"Well, that was her. At some point, I don't know when, she was caught, and sentenced to death. Permanent death." The Doctor paused, as if preparing himself for something awful, "There is a planet that specializes in execution. They had a way to kill a Time Lord permanently, and part of that was locking the body up for a thousand years. The other part was... another Time Lord was required to carry out the sentence." He looked at Jack, desperately, hoping he would understand. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't kill her, Jack. She's my oldest friend in the universe. I had only promised to look after her body for a thousand years, I never said I would kill her."

Jack thought of Captain John Hart, and what he might do if their situations were similar. He looked down. "I get it. I think you're an absolute idiot, but I get it." Jack paused, then asked, "So, Bill, where does she fit in to all that?"

The Doctor sighed in relief, thankful that Jack wasn't angry with him. "She originally just served chips at the university, but she started coming to my lectures. Several people show up at my lectures that aren't supposed to, but she was different. Whenever she didn't understand something, she smiled. I started tutoring her, helped to enroll her in the school. She fell in love with this girl called Heather, who got sucked into a puddle of sentient spacecraft oil leak, and started chasing Bill. Bill eventually figured the problem out and released Heather. We had traveled in the TARDIS to try to shake puddle girl. I was going to wipe her memory of the incident but I changed my mind and asked her to travel with me instead."

"But what about the Vault? What happens when you're gone?"

"It's a time machine, Jack," the Doctor responded teasingly, "Have you managed to forget that over all these years?"

Jack shrugged his shoulders. "Good point." His eyes lit up. "So since you've been traveling again, you probably have lots of good stories. Tell me your adventures, Doctor."

"I know you have great stories too. You first," he insisted.

"Alright," Jack said, launching into a story about ghosts that came out of the rain.

"They were called the Night Travelers..." he began.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, I might add on chapters of them telling each other stories? I don't know if it would be worth it though, so please leave a comment if you would want me to elaborate on their storytelling!


End file.
